In the era when evolutionary psychologists declared women as trading sex for stability of their offspring, feminists left them with the options of either raunchy debauchery or celibacy, and medical experts invented ‘female sexual dysfunction’ to be fixed with medication, poetry might provide more nuanced yet also more blush-inducing answers for those wanting to understand better what really lurks under the so-called ‘female mystique’.

If you’re curious, come along to La Femme Erotica, an event presented as a part of the Overload Poetry Festival 2011, where a bunch of outstanding performers, two of whom happened to be also physicians, have a shot at following in the faraway footsteps of Sappho’s tradition and the more local ones of Dorothy Porter, in their explorations of female erotica through poetry and music.

The Overload Founding Director and La Femme Erotica MC Steve Smart and Daryl Efron, paediatrician and musician, will add some testosterone to the female poetic line-up that includes the internationally acclaimed poets-performers Emilie Zoey Baker and Alicia Sometimes, the award winning poet and general practitioner Leah Kaminsky and the evening’s organiser, Lee Kofman